Sudano-Sahelian Architecture

Sudano-Sahelian architecture is a distinctive West African building tradition found across the Sahel region, including present day Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, built almost entirely from banco, a sun dried mudbrick, rather than stone or fired brick. Its defining visual feature is a dense array of wooden support beams called toron, which project outward from the building's mud surface and serve as built in scaffolding, allowing masons to climb the facade each year to apply the fresh coat of mud plaster the structures need after the seasonal rains erode their surface. Buildings in this tradition are typically massed with tapering, buttress like walls and conical or pyramidal towers, giving them a sculptural, fortress like silhouette suited to the mudbrick material's structural limits. The style's most famous single monument is the Great Mosque of Djenne in Mali, rebuilt in its current form in 1907 on the site of earlier mosques dating back centuries, recognized as the largest mudbrick building in the world and inscribed, together with the old town of Djenne around it, as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.